Fragile by Yes (1972)
A Random CD Review from the Stutzman Memorial Library
Fragile by Yes (1972)Well, Excel really picked a winner for today. It’s no secret I’m a big fan of old-school Yes and this is one of their classic albums. Even non-prog people have at least heard of this album. This one was on pretty heavy rotation in my car around my junior or senior year in high school. This kind of musical excellence deserves a rack-by-track breakdown:
“Roundabout” -one of the best starts to an album that I can recall. It’s a quick fade-in that kind of sounds like “uuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnnggggggggghhhhhhhhhhHAT!” And then immediately after it: bling! Open string harmonics on an acoustic guitar. I’m not sure how they achieved that backwards fade-in, probably some cutting and splicing of tape, but it’s an amazing effect. This song has one of the coolest rock bass lines ever, some excellent organ work by Rick Wakeman and just all around fantastic production, melodies and harmonies…..Man! This is a perfect rock n’ roll song! (Well, maybe not perfect, I think the lyrics were written by a 17th century Martian.)
“Cans and Brahms” -so one of their ideas for this album was for each member in the band to have a solo piece that was their baby and this is Rick Wakeman’s adaptation of some Brahms theme for an orchestra of analog synths a la Wendy Carlos.
“We Have Heaven” –this is Jon Anderson’s multi-tracked a capella vocal piece. I can’t think of anything more to write about it. So I won’t.
“South Side of the Sky” –one of the three or four actual full band songs on the album. Can I relate to you how awesome Chris Squire’s bass sound is on this song and on the whole record for that matter? I doubt it.
“Five Per Cent For Nothing” – this is drummer Bill Bruford’s compositional contribution to the album and is just odd meter weirdness that probably only appeals to other prog-rock drummer-type people.
“Long Distance Runaround/Fish” –this, along with the opening track, you hear quite a bit on the radio and rightly so, I think. This is, once again, a show of fantastic musicianship as they play the syncopated groove underneath Steve Howe’s quirky guitar line. There are a couple very memorable melodies in this song, (which was, incidentally, covered nicely by Red House Painters), and it segues right into Chris Squire’s bass showpiece, “Fish (Schindleria Praematurus.)
“Mood for a Day” -Steve Howe is a phenomenal acoustic guitarist. Enough said.
“Heart of the Sunrise” –this is a great epic song that has several sections. Robert Fripp once accused them of stealing the beginning riff from a King Crimson song. Be that as it may, there are some very dynamic sections to this song and some melodies that stuck in my head for days at a time when I was in high school just discovering this stuff, probably because Jon Anderson turned in a fantastic vocal. This is a great last song for an album and I’ve always been kind of annoyed at their choice to stick a little reprise of “We Have Heaven” at the end.
Anyway, this early Yes music is some great stuff if you’re interested in musicians with high ideals who care about their craft. Unfortunately, about twelve years after this album was created, Yes became another thing entirely, which I choose to not talk about, for fear I’ll stain this computer screen with tears of sorrow.
Grandpa Griffith CD Release
Grandpa Griffith fans- I have some good news to report.
Next week will be our CD Release Corporate Event (Party). Mark your calendars for next Friday, April 7th. 7:00-10:00 PM. Go to
http://www.grandpagriffith.com/ for more details. Invite lots of friends. This event has been specially designed to be family-friendly so as to appease our many under-age fans who have not been able to see us play in awhile as well as anybody else who is more familiar with the business world than the “night-life” world.
Whatcha Readin'? Oh, Just Some Renaissance Plays
Continuing on in Renaissance reading, I started Christopher Marlowe’s
Dr. Faustus last night and finished it this morning. It’s an interesting little tale of a scholar who has pursued and acquired all knowledge and takes on the dark arts. This is the play where “selling your soul to the devil” comes from and I assume is the model for the American folk legend of guys like Robert Johnson “going to the crossroads.” This was a very quick and easy read and I found it easier to get through than most Shakespearean plays. The language is quite beautiful and evocative at points and the last speech of Faustus is probably a standard in every stage actor’s repertoire. Or at least it should be.
I was really pulling for Faustus to turn around in the end and accept God’s forgiveness, but alas, he dies in despair, unconvinced that he can be redeemed. Sorry if I ruined the ending for anybody.
An interesting side note-the author, Christopher Marlowe, was very close to being prosecuted for the crime of
atheism at the time of his death.
Mark another one off the list of books I was supposed to read in college.
Don Quixote
So, I finished the monstrously long
Don Quixote, translated by Edith Grossman, last night. There is a certain feeling of accomplishment whenever I tackle a huge book like that. I must say I liked Book I better than Book II because of the frequency of new “adventures” in the first half.
The whole time I was reading this book I was constantly trying to figure out exactly what it is that makes this book such an internationally revered “classic.” True, it’s monumental in scope, (almost 1000 pages in this translation), but there’s got to be more to it than that. After all, encyclopedias are monumental in scope, but they’re never considered literary masterpieces. I was also wondering what Cervantes was trying to say with this.
He was writing at the same time as Shakespeare and my first impression is that this was a humorous critique of chivalric romance and the novels that perpetuated those ideas. The character of Don Quixote, in a fit of delusions inspired by novels of knight errantry, goes off to set the world to right and bumbles his way through-sometimes as victim, sometimes as unwitting victimizer. The one constant is his skewed vision of reality, he never sees the world as it is, but rather sees it as a chivalric romance would describe it.
So, I know that criticism is there. But I wonder-why is (or was) chivalry an appropriate subject for skewering? “Ah, it’s all just a bunch of dreams, chivalry,” a dug-up Cervantes would probably say. “There ain’t no such thing as honor and duty and love, at least not as it was depicted in those old novels.”
You know, when I was in high school, I’ll sheepishly admit I had some pretty chivalrous ideas about love-mooning over chaste, pure beauty as if it was the force behind all my actions. I liked the idea of love setting me off to be a better person. The problem with this was that those “chaste, pure beauties” had no choice in the matter. They were just objects of my flights of romantic fancy- not living, breathing girls who didn’t even like me. It’s really kind of humorous, the male gaze, and I think Cervantes definitely captures that humor in his bumbling knight.
But I was reading up just a tiny bit and other people approach this early novel as a tale of morality, a study of individual ethics vs. social dictates of reality. Of course, this is very interesting to a post-modernist like myself, inundated with language of the “here-but-not-yet Kingdom of God.” But whether Cervantes really wanted to tout Don Quixote as an honest-to-God hero is very questionable in my book. To say that Quixote is a flawed protagonist is a heavy understatement. In his head, he is the greatest knight in the world, (a world which, by the way, has actually moved on from knights and knight-errantry), yet in every one of his early skirmishes he gets beaten to a pulp. This reality makes no impression on his claims. So, is he a madman worthy of laughter or is he a determined, uncompromising man worthy of admiration? I don’t know. But that’s one thing I liked about this book. (I will say that I would lean towards the verdict of “madman.”)
Another cool thing I found about this book is the displacement of narration and meta-textual elements that arise in the second part of the book as Cervantes cites another source for the second part as well as makes frequent allusions to an actual rebel text by another author that supposedly continued Don Quixote’s story, all the while continuing the story itself.
But, as usual I think the interesting things about this book are what we as readers bring to it. You know, we have four hundred years of history and new ideas that we bring to the table when we read this book, so the number of possible interpretations seems almost limitless.
I’m not sure I would recommend this book to anyone. I think it appeals to a very specific type of nerd with oodles of patience and time on their hands. But I liked it well enough.
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack: Scent of a Woman (1992)
A Random CD Review from the Stutzman Memorial Library
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack to Scent of a Woman by Thomas Newman (1992)I haven’t listened to this album in probably four or five years, so I’m not really familiar with it. But that’s the beauty of the randomizer, isn’t it?
This is one of a few CDs that my dad bought when I was much younger that somehow, by some mysterious levitating force, found their way into my collection of CDs. My dad is probably one of the main sources of my raging musical eclecticism. I remember when I was in high school, trying to ignore such popular music tripe like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Cypress Hill, my dad went through a Guns n’ Roses phase. This from a man who kept the radio frozen on the country music station and who would go on to be an NPR and Garrison Keillor junkie.
Well, anyway, this is one of those odd CDs that my dad bought and the only things I really remember about the music contained therein involves orchestration. The primary palette of colors that Newman uses includes dulcimer, synthesized bass, and orchestra. It’s an odd artistic decision, but it’s at least interesting. I remember thinking at the time that it was a real no-no to mix electric instruments with those of the orchestra. And there is a great tango in the middle of it all, which is probably the reason my dad bought it.
As for the movie itself, I’ll always remember my parents telling me about seeing this
Scent of a Woman movie and Chris O’Donnell’s character reminding them of me—always trying to do the right thing. That was a rare moment of knowing exactly how I looked in ma and pa’s eyes. Do you guys ever wonder that? How other people really see you?
That’s all for today. Hopefully next time the randomizer will pick something I’m a little more familiar with.
Green Chimneys:The Music of Thelonious Monk by Andy Summers (1999)
A Random CD Review from The Stutzman Memorial Library
So, the computerized hopper provided the number 562 for today’s blog, which is:
Green Chimneys: The Music of Thelonious Monk by Andy Summers (1999)All right, so everybody knows that Andy Summers was the guitar player for The Police, one of my all-time favorite bands. (Funny I never mentioned that before.) But did you ever wonder what he has been up to since his band broke up? After a couple of collaborations with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp immediately after The Police, I think he might have disappeared for a little bit, but he re-emerged with some more traditional jazz chops. (Interesting side-note, he was the bandleader for the very short-lived Dennis Miller show that, if memory serves correctly, was on around the same time in history as the Arsenio Hall show.)
So we come to this set of music originally composed by Thelonious Monk, arranged for a band led by electric guitar. Now, Andy Summers has a surprisingly distinctive guitar tone-kind of liquid and chorused-out and the thing I love about his playing is his harmonic sophistication, which would seem a perfect match for Monk, whose musical vocabulary was a little odd in its’ own right. The real trick that Summers exploits is his use of open strings in combination with traditional jazz chording. It’s an easily identifiable sound, like I said, but over the course of a whole album, things start to sound kind of same-ey. And sometimes, the music wanders close to the dreaded “smooth jazz” track, at least production-wise, which is a real no-no in my book, being largely a jazz traditionalist. (But that’s fodder for a much longer discussion and will only make me cranky.) However, I’m not so much of a traditionalist that I can’t handle a little fusion like this stuff. The two highlights for me are some jazz cello and the one guest vocal by Sting on “’Round Midnight,” which I’ve never heard performed vocally before.
Overall, this is kind of background music for the Starbucks and Barnes & Noble set, but when I make the effort to listen closely to Summers, I can appreciate how he kind of bridges the rock idiom, (with blues-based lines) with traditional or bop-inspired jazz. Nothing world-shattering here, but pleasant enough.
The Aquabats vs. The Floating Eye of Death (1999)
Out of ideas. Well, why not revisit the talk about music? That’s what I’m most interested in anyway. And this is my blog, so step off if you don’t agree.
I had a hunch a long time ago that it was a good idea to catalog all of my CDs in Excel for insurance reasons. You see, I’ve got A LOT of CDs. And using the RANDBETWEEN function to truly randomly pick a title for me-well, we’re going to have such fun. (Am I writing for my blog or for
Nerd City? It’s hard to distinguish sometimes.)
A Random CD Review from the Stutzman Memorial Library:
The Aquabats vs. The Floating Eye of Death (1999)So, today I bring you The Aquabats. I discovered these goofy bastards when I was working at the music store. I could pretty much guess their musical aesthetic just by looking at their album covers--six or seven guys dressed up in old-school-looking superhero costumes.
“Ska band,” Collin (a fellow employee) and I said as we shelved their first album. Incidentally, that’s one of the interesting ways to engage your mind when working at a music store, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of albums you’ve never heard of--to imagine in your head what the music contained therein sounds like. You just have to think that for even the most obscure, inane-looking album you come across, there’s a band attached to it with some kind of local following.
Anyway, when we finally opened up and played an Aquabats CD, our expectations were pretty much confirmed. There were definitely a lot of ska elements-upbeat guitar “chicks” and horns. But The Aquabats provide a little more. They deal with pretty cartoonish subject matter, catchy melodies, and the occasional fourth or fifth chord. The vocals strike you as regular guys messing around, kind of like an Everyman’s attempt at opera.
Vs. The Floating Eye of Death is a pretty good introduction to the Aquabats’ oeuvre. Some of the subject matter: a giant robot with bird-like head, a man with gluey hands, a man being forced to marry a monster, apocalyptical destruction, and the history of the domestication of dogs. Clearly these guys aren’t out to save the world with art, which is a sketchy prospect anyway. The thing that separates this album from the first two is a little more RAWK and a little less ska: guitars a little heavier, drums a little simpler. At the same time, there are some nice synth and organ sounds. My faves: “Anti-matter,” “Lovers of Loving Love,” “Canis Lupis,” and “Amino Man,” one of the most affecting rock choruses accompanied by non-serious subject matter I’ve ever heard.
I’m not one to narrow things down to easy and quick ratings, but I would place this album in the “Good” region: not “Great,” but “Good.” This is an entertaining collection of songs, most of which are capable of sticking in your head well after the CD is done.
At a Loss for Words
Sorry it’s been awhile since I’ve written, my lovelies. What with getting all of my musical influences covered and all of the road trip memories, I must say that I don’t have much to say anymore. Just when you all thought I was this fabulously interesting person…I’m here to tell you I’m just as boring as the next guy. Actually, I’m more boring than the next guy, because at least the next guy has me writing about him.
Anyway, I guess I’ve got some thinking to do unless you, kind reader, have something you would like to discuss with me.
Until I think of something to write about-farewell, my love.
Dude, Seriously. When's the New Album Coming Out?
Attention, Grandpa Griffith fans. I have heard the new album,
Electric Scooter Holiday Blowout, in its’ finished, final form. The master was delivered to us earlier this week and I gave it a listen in the car last night. I even sat in the car in the garage to listen to the last three or four songs. All in all, I think it sounds great! “We Are the Thinkers” made me a little misty, which to everybody else sounds downright bizarre, I’m sure. But, when you get so involved in the creation of something…
The mastering process gave every instrument a definite place in the mix. Every little tambourine and shaker speaks clearly. And a certain bass drum sound on a certain new song that nobody’s heard before sounded like it was right there in the car with me. There’s a high-end sheen with the sound that I think you can only get with professional ears and professional equipment.
So, everything from this point on is pretty much within our control. Matt’s just doing some final touches on the artwork and we will hopefully be sending it off for duplication by the end of next week.
It’s getting close, friends.
Live or Memorex?
There are a multitude of things upon which my mind has come to a standstill. One of these is the question of live performance vs. recorded performance. As I sat way up in the balcony at last Saturday’s Philharmonic concert listening to Kernis’s beautiful
Musica Celestis, an intense, often quiet, strings-only imagining of angels singing, I felt so frustrated. Not because of the music, but because of my fellow’s man’s interruptions of the music. There the string players were-waaaay the heck down there, gently playing with such sensitivity and restraint, but all I could focus on were all of the extraneous noises: a chair scraping on the floor, a cell phone going off, the guy next to me sighing at all of the noise, and the coughing. Oh, my Lord, the coughing!
Studies show that Oklahoma is one of the least healthy states in the country and I definitely believe it after hearing that pointilistic symphony of phlegm. Just about every eight to ten seconds, someone else would cough. It was maddening! The whole time I was thinking, “Man, I really need to find this piece on CD, so as to really be able to appreciate it in the peace and quiet of my own home.” Hell really is other people.
Anyway, this all got me to thinking. What is the value of live musical performance? Or even, IS there anything special about it? I mean to say, is the appreciation of music being performed in front of you that much different than just listening to a recording? Of course, you have the visual component. And for me, it’s always interesting to watch musicians play- the way they move, the expressions on their face. But beyond that, is one better than the other?
A recording is of course a musical moment frozen in time, infinitely analyzable if you so desire. I guess hearing and seeing music live is to be co-creators in the ever-passing moment, surrendering some of the ability of large-scale analysis that is more natural with recordings. John Cage went so far as to make no distinction between the experience of live music and the music itself in his famous piece
4’33”.
And I’m sure some would tout the “awesomeness of sharing the experience with other people, dude,” but I tend to forget everyone else in the room other than the performers, (unless it’s impossible, like I described above.)
Another value in live performance comes about when you know the material well and you can discern what the performers are doing differently, (either in relation to tradition or in relation to how that particular ensemble has played the material), maybe even on the spur of the moment. Of course, the degrees of deviation are linked to the style or genre of music you’re listening to.
Anyway, all that to say I don’t know which I like better: live music or recordings.
Great Road Trips I Have Known-Episode VI: City Under Siege
So, the last solo road trip I took was last summer, making a big rectangle shape over the western United States. I had really missed California and the ocean, so I planned on going there by way of Wyoming. Makes sense, right? As much as I loved California, the high plains of Wyoming and Montana have always intrigued me as well. In my head, cowboys and Indians and maybe dinosaurs still lived out in those vast open spaces and no one had bothered to check on it. In my head, Wyoming was just a big square of wilderness. Like I’ve said previously-something about getting out into the quiet, middle-of-nowhere really resonates the strings within me.
Traveling due north through New Mexico and Colorado into Wyoming was quite a departure for me, having never been any further north than, say, Colorado Springs or Green River, Utah-whichever is further. The landscape at the border of Colorado and Wyoming makes a pretty quick change from mountains and green to desolate yellow high grass, all the way to Cheyenne, which feels like an outpost on the edge of civilization, kind of like a “last chance” kind of thing. At that point I started driving west and didn’t stop until I hit the ocean.
One of the singular moments of the trip was in the desert of northern Nevada: the turn off for Highway 140 has a sign that says “No Services for 179 miles.” To call it a highway is kind of deceptive. It’s a road- a long, long road that unfolds in a straight line farther off into the curve of the earth than you can see. Obviously, these aren’t the kinds of places you see a bunch of people at
any time, especially early in the afternoon in the middle of the week. So I just shifted the car into neutral and let it coast to a stop. And that was the place I pulled off the road, got the guitar out and serenaded the dead quiet desert with my bad singing. I don’t imagine the bugs and birds have ever heard those kinds of sounds before. Unless the rocks cry out like David says.
Of course, from that point, it’s another couple days of driving before coastline is a realistic thought. But driving south on Highway 1 from its’ start in northern California is a wonderfully varied visual experience-from the ancient redwood forests to the farmland that juts out right up to the ocean. The curvy, winding roads make you feel like you’re in a giant, daylong car commercial.
The last thing I did before heading back east to Lake Tahoe and, eventually, home, was a quick drive through wine country north of San Francisco.
Overall, I must say that this “what does it all mean?” trip was the least fulfilling. I didn’t lock eyes with one pleasant person, other than the girl who took my order at an In & Out Burgers in Davis, CA. I missed my friends and the comforts of home pretty sharply this time. I hate to admit it, but around the time I hit the boredom of eastbound Kansas in the rain, I had a vague hope that this was the last one of these trips. Secretly, (well,
not so secretly
now), I hoped that I am past the period of my life where I have this urge to exile myself as the lonely traveler. Secretly, I wanted to be bound for a more “traditional” role for myself-a role where I integrate well with people, maybe even have someone special to
share experiences with.
We’ll see what becomes of all of that.
